27/07/19
The CSO Quarter 1 2019 new dwellings completion report confirms a strong upward trend across all housing construction activity data sets.
“While it is important to continue our efforts to ensure that this trend is maintained and even further improved, it is encouraging to see today’s results,” says Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy.
“In order to properly address homelessness” he continues, “affordability and the challenges in housing, we need to fix supply. These numbers show that this is happening.
The help-to-buy scheme should be extended “sooner rather than later” to help first-time buyers being priced out, a mortgage expert has said.
Joey Sheahan of MyMortgages.ie was speaking as a report from EY and DKM showed nearly half of all counties in the Republic are now unaffordable for first time buyers on an average income.
There will be a “dramatic fall off” in first-time buyers entering the market next year if the Help-to-Buy scheme is not extended.
That was the stark warning from the head of credit at MyMortgages.ie, Joe Sheahan, who was responding to the latest Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures on house prices.
While house prices continue to ease with the annual rate of increase in May now the lowest in six years, prices increased by 2.8% nationally in the year to May, compared to a 3% increase in the year to April.
Paul O’Donoghue
Irish consumers pay an average of more than €150 each month on their mortgages compared with their European peers because of high interest rates, an expert has said.
One-fifth of all property sales in the first quarter of 2019 were to large international investors and real estate investment trusts. A new report from the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) shows the extent to which investors are impacting on the private housing market in Ireland.
Charlie Weston
Q Both my wife and I are social welfare pensioners, and we are paying interest-only repayments on our home mortgage. We re-mortgaged the house to keep our business going in 2005, but the business failed in 2013. We recently exited insolvency, and the only outstanding debt is a mortgage of €216,000 on the family home.